‘They don’t want you to be in their gang’: the problem with academic literacy, and feminist/posthumanist possibilities for doing it otherways
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Although effective academic literacy skills are important for student success in higher education, developing these skills does not usually form part of the disciplinary curricula at UK universities. Students are largely expected to acquire these literacies independently, outside of the classroom, without input from disciplinary specialists, despite that fact that literacies are discipline-specific and important for disciplinary-based assessment. Meanwhile, the traditional service-led model of co-curricular academic skills support – generic, and often remedial and/or relying on student self-referral – still predominates, despite the acknowledged limitations of this model. Academic literacy development therefore constitutes a hidden curriculum in higher education, representing a barrier for students’ sense of belonging, engagement and outcomes which risks reproducing educational inequities. These issues are compounded by the traditionally monocultural and monomodal conceptualisation of academic literacy, which is increasingly anachronistic in the post‑digital era. This article explores insights from a practitioner–researcher study investigating the academic reading experiences of undergraduate students and educators at a post-92 London University, which highlights the harmful affective and relational impacts of normative academic literacy practices. It suggests that the interlinked feminist/posthumanist concepts of assemblage, becoming and sympoesis present a way of reframing academic literacy pedagogies and practices to develop dynamic embedded communities of literacy practices comprising students, disciplinary educators and academic developers.
Source: PRACTICE
Author: Katherine Pechey
Institution: London South Bank University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7214537151